It started with a picnic basket. A wedding shower gift in 1976 — wooden-lidded, sturdy enough to outlast the marriage gifts on either side of it. Joanna kept it. Then she started filling the house with others like it.
Diaper baskets. Bread baskets. Library tote baskets. For years it was just a quiet love of the form — until the summer of 1991, when Joanna was living at a Christian camp in northern Wisconsin and an avid basket maker drove up from Milwaukee to teach a class. A friend paid the ten-dollar material fee. Joanna pulled up a chair at the table. By the end of the afternoon she had her own first basket and, in her words, was immediately hooked.
Basket weaving moved into first place among her crafts and never moved back. By 1992 Joanna was teaching and selling at craft fairs across northern Wisconsin — Log Jam, Log Boom, and the local circuits around Rhinelander and Minocqua. She registered the name with the state in 1993: Joanna's Collections. In 1995 the family moved to the farm, and the work moved with them. Every piece signed. Every piece dated.
Thirty-five years on, that count sits at more than seventeen thousand baskets, hundreds of classes taught, and a catalogue of patterns we still weave from today.
A name, carried forward.
Across 2026 — a year of slow handover, not a single step — two of Joanna's nine children, Jesse and Kate, took on the running of the business and the bulk of the weaving. They renamed it Jo & Co. Reedworks; the "Jo" from Joanna stays at the front. Jesse handles the custom side: measurements, commissions, built-ins. Kate runs the ready-made catalogue: the finished baskets, the kits, the patterns. Joanna stays on after the transition, weaving the patterns she loves best whenever she's of a mind to.
What hasn't changed is how a basket is made. Each piece is still cut, shaped, woven, and finished by hand — in one of three shops: Joanna's in Stillwater, Jesse's in Wisconsin, Kate's in Minnesota — using the patterns and finishes Joanna spent decades dialing in. Every basket signed. Every basket dated.
What we're trying to do.
The art of basketweaving, as Joanna likes to point out, is nearly as old as the creation of time. The world has not run out of plastic bins. But a well-woven, handmade basket is still something worth keeping — something that holds up, wears in rather than wears out, and carries the initials of whoever finished it on a small stamp on the bottom of the basket.
That's the whole brief. It hasn't changed in thirty-five years, and we don't intend to change it now.